Scare Quotes from Shakespeare: Marx, Keynes, and the Language of Reenchantment (review)

REVIEWS in the wake ofPietism: the religious beliefin the efficacy ofdivine word and prayer gave way to beliefin the incantory authority ofthe poet's voice. Such questions are bound to be asked ofsuch a wide-ranging, thought-provoking project as that of The Romantic Performative, a work that, despite its breadth, offers depth ofinsight via its meticulous attention to textual detail. This study breathes respect for precise communication; one sees it not only in Esterhammer's devotion to the authors' words in her close readings but also in her own exact command oflanguage. Alice A. KuzniarUniversity ofNorth Carolina at Chapel Hill MARTIN HARREES. Scare Quotesfrom Shakespeare: Marx, Keynes, and the Language ofReenchantment. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000. 209 pp. Martin Harries has written an interesting, evocative book, which tries to capture a cultural space that, he thinks, no longer exists (182-3). That space, which existed "from roughly the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth" (5), was one in which writers like Marx or Keynes could allude to the supernatural in Shakespeare in order to signal their own uneasy "recognition ofand grappling with material effects ofthe unreal and irrational, effects that resist the political economists' efforts to legislate or prophesize" (8). Harries argues that during this period, "the supernatural moments in Shakespeare provide a privileged language for the perception of reenchantment" (9). Or, to put it somewhat differently, Harries argues that "a particular aspect ofmodernity, reenchantment, discovers its image in appropriations of supernatural aspects in Shakespeare's plays" (9). Thus, the majority ofScare Quotesfrom Shakespeare consists ofa set ofpaired readings—a chapter on Marx's 7Ae Eighteenth Brumaire followed by one on Shakespeare's Hamlet, both focused broadly on ghosts, and a chapter on Keynes's The Economic Consequences ofthe Peace followed by one on Shakespeare's Macbeth, both focused broadly on equivocation and witchcraft. A short introduction and conclusion and a chapter on Henry Dircks, the nineteenth-century inventor ofthe phantasmagoria, round out the book. Dircks is emblematic for Harries, helping him to picture for us the modem encounter with enchantment, as Dircks's "enlightenment project ofa literal-minded kind—the mechanical production ofghosts in order to debunk superstition—ends in an encounter with the stubborn recalcitrance of the supernatural" (26). But Dircks takes Harries only so far: despite the "occult disappointments" he faces, Dircks remains wedded to the proposition "that progress is slowly eradicating superstition and the irrational." The inventor ofPepper's Ghost "exists in a historical predicament he never begins to see." In contrast, Marx and Keynes "acknowledge the difficulty the supernatural poses to the representations ofhistory" and each faces "troubling questions about what reenchantment means for our notions of modernity" (27). That Marx and Keynes face "troubling questions" about the role ofthe irrational in our political calculus, rather than confidently assume the irrelevance of it, clearly wins the approval ofHarries; it is rather less clear whether he thinks it imperative for his writers or for us to find answers to those questions. Rather than hurriedly sketch details of the argument in each of Harries's chapters, I would like in this short review to address a more fundamental issue that Scare Quotes crystallizes, the issue ofmethodology in new historicism or cultural studies. Almost fifteen years ago, in "Political Criticism ofShakespeare," Walter Cohen complained about new historicism's "commitment to arbitrary connectedVoI . 26 (2002): 162 THE COMPAKATIST ness," the methodological assumption "that any one aspect ofa society is related to any other" (34). While acknowledging that this methodology can produce "impressive results, [. . .] suggestive evocations ofthe density, the texture ofearly modem society," it nevertheless "limits the persuasiveness of much new historicist work" insofar as both causal reasoning and empirical evidence are inevitably shirked (34, 36). Six years later, in The Culture ofViolence, Francis Barker seconded Cohen's critique in a compelling and passionate reading of Titus Andronicus, and one year after that, John Guillory reinforced these critiques by calling for the various strands ofliterary and cultural analysis—new historicism, cultural studies, and the new social history—to adopt "the most critical and the most sophisticated methodological resources of the social sciences" so as to facilitate the convergence of these humanistic disciplines into "forms of historical sociology" ("Literary Critics...